The Rehearsal - Nathan Fielder - HBO

Yeah my original Hidden text was the cop cursing the day the Chinese invented gunpowder, that line ruined me

building the exact replica of the bar was insane. I'd watch a little documentary on that aspect alone

think it bodes well for what the HBO budget is gonna allow them to do

lol whoops. I guess the actor was too convincing

Wife and I were wondering if there’s gonna be a twist in the last episode where everybody’s been an actor the whole time and everything we’ve seen has been a rehearsal for making the “actual” show

Haven't read anything about it yet but I imagine this was a particularly arduous show to finish after COVID. The Cheap Chick in the City blog posts Nathan looks at were all from 2019.

Both of the actors were fantastic at capturing their respective subjects.

NGL, this kinda got me emotional at points. It's an insane concept built for max laffs while also addressing some deeper shit. It's basically exposure therapy taken to the most ridiculous extreme.

feels like this show is gonna be “finding frances: the series,” and yeah, sign me up

The character detail on just the few seconds of Thrifty Boy, with him snacking on packets of ketchup…

I would really like to see that insane flow chart they made

https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/9e4/695/487767ff5901db3cbe83303c942e373672-the-rehearsal-ep1.rsquare.w330.jpghttps://64.media.tumblr.com/08d6c9fe2aeec7c979563473924bf015/042f003c17c0df93-1f/s1280x1920/7ea103a34e83a9fff4873364f838f99e062ab6c7.jpg

some Redditor was actually on Cash Cab with this guy a decade ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BADGSUbWfMk

they were part of a trivia team. and yes, he did tell him he had a Masters

(amusingly it seems Cash Cab is also fake - it's a real game show but they don't just pick people up off the street)

“His whole educational status has been a scam.” pic.twitter.com/Zgse9B8jCg

— Scout Tafoya (@Honors_Zombie) July 19, 2022

(amusingly it seems Cash Cab is also fake - it's a real game show but they don't just pick people up off the street)

can confirm

https://www.vulture.com/article/nathan-fielder-the-rehearsal-alligator-lounge-visit.html

My friend Danny showed up, and I asked him what he thought of the episode. He said that in the first scene at the real Alligator Lounge, when it looks as if there are hidden cameras scoping it out, he recognized regulars in the crowd, including one of his friends. And here’s where the plot thickens: Danny said that in the climactic scene in which Kor and Tricia actually do bar trivia, he “didn’t recognize anyone. Even the bartender was different.” Danny said the trivia host in the episode wasn’t the usual guy who hosted in 2019, either. To be clear, Danny is a true Alligator Lounge regular. He knows the space; he knows the crowd. He believed that the confession scene, the one that was supposed to be the “real” moment after many, many staged ones, was more staged than the show let on. He also directed me to a post on the Instagram account of Trivial Dispute, the group that organizes these bar-trivia nights. Overlaid on a screengrab of the episode were the words “AS (SORT OF) SEEN ON THE REHEARSAL! ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTIONS!”

I reached out via Instagram to Adam Kesner, the man behind Trivial Dispute, which hosts a number of trivia nights in bars across New York throughout the week; the group has run the program at Alligator Lounge since 2007. Kesner usually writes the questions every week but confirmed that a different host and pre-written questions were provided by The Rehearsal’s production company for the final trivia night in the episode. “The only issue I had with the show was the subpar question quality,” said Kesner, who theorized that the questions were written to generate those funny “clue inception” beats rather than a challenging night of real-life bar trivia.

layers within layers

Starting to think "Nathan Fielder" is himself an elaborate ruse.

I guess we could still get

a twist in the last episode where everybody’s been an actor the whole time and everything we’ve seen has been a rehearsal for making the “actual” show

This was nuts

Early in the show the guy showed a photo of the whole trivia team, which looked like a typical,uh, size of one of those. Why would this night have been only the two of them?

the gunpowder thing, the answer was gunpowder, not China. How the heck was that question phrased?

he tells nathan early on that he'll invite her to a two-person trivia night with the excuse that they haven't hung out together in awhile or something xp

per the earlier writeup, I'm thinking the two person trivia night is an invention of the show!

i shouldn't have phrased it that way -- it's not that the bar is hosting only teams of two, it's just that their team will just be the two of them for that night

We saw how seriously they all take it. The others are just going to sit one out? I don't think so. Whatever you have to say, you can say it to all of us

I assumed it wasn't their regular night, this was some bonus night at a different bar than usual?

Nathan Fielder is clearly a genius.

iirc i think it was him inviting her to a trivia night that he usually does solo

diabolical

https://cheapchickinthecity.wordpress.com/

they are still playing to this day
but that's about all she can say

Given the size of that massive flow chart I figured having multiple people there would have just been way too complicated

he overplayed his hand with the second episode, this is obviously much more staged than it pretends to be.

still creepy as fuck though

I'm more excited about where the show is going because at this point it could go anywhere. It is clearly scripted and better for it. After the first episode I wondered if it was going to follow the same formula throughout, but now it seems like something weirder is going on.

maybe I’m a rube but I trust nathan completely and I’m just happy to be on the ride

yea i mean who cares if there is a structure, it will overall be better for it

nathan w the scion guy felt like john wilson - amazing & could not have been planned

ep 2 was great, was a little on the fence after ep 1 but now it has immediately gone somewhere weirder and more ambiguous I’m totally on board

discussing whether this experience would be traumatizing for the babies involved of course inevitably led to Is it bad for a baby to see you masturbating?

I was utterly perplexed by this second episode. What purpose did the first episode serve if it was just going to pivot to a multi-episode narrative? Anyone else feel that the first episode was filmed pre-pandemic, and the second much later? Did they really relocate the bar? Is this really going to be a multi-episode arc? It's kind of refreshing to see a show where I have absolutely no idea what's going on.

he overplayed his hand with the second episode, this is obviously much more staged than it pretends to be.

― i cannot help if you made yourself not funny (forksclovetofu), Saturday, July 23, 2022 12:07 AM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

I was thinking when Nathan hesitantly agreed to step in as a babysitter that the baby's actual mother was just like a hundred feet away from the house.

But as others have said, I don't really care about any artificial elements. There's a certain suspension of disbelief required here (do we really think he transported his elaborate Alligator Lounge set across state lines on a whim?). And I do half believe One Eye Open's theory that everything we're seeing may be one big rehearsal for something entirely unexpected.

Given the leap between the first and second episode I think that's a really good guess. Like, it's going to end with him in the bar, and then the camera will pan out and reveal that the bar has been rebuilt once again in a warehouse in Antarctica or something. "Maybe we are meant to be alone. Maybe all of life is just a long rehearsal to teach us what it's like to be alone, after everyone and everything we know and love has disappeared or died. Or maybe being alone is our natural state, but being with others is what gives us a soul."

yeah as far my enjoyment of the show i have no interest in whats actually real or staged. I think its clear that he is interested in telling a scripted story about a character, and its going to be told through the lens of a "nathan for you" style comedic reality show but it is not going to actually be that show.

impression I get is that the people are real but the situations may be staged - for instance Kor's insistence that trivia night goes well is probably something the producers told him to do, but Kor's dilemma itself were probably real. I think NFY would pull tricks like that a lot. as for this recent one I don't think either one of them were actors (Robin seems to have an online trail of being a weird dude) but I am guessing they tried pretty hard to drive Robin out of that house

but yeah blurring the lines between real and staged is sort of this show's whole deal, not to mention a lot of what NFY was doing near the end

Interesting. I haven't looked up Robin at all, but sleeping in a different room and being woken up at least once felt like plenty to get him out of there.

ugh, i had to tap out during the scene where she's whispering her prayer. it's "cringe", but that shit really does hit home. i remember being surrounded by people whispering these things to themselves, always loud enough that the adults next to them (and me, who i guess they thought was too little/childish to understand what was going on) could hear, and remembering the passages in my illustrated bible showing pharisees loudly praying with their faces and hands turned up to god so that everyone nearby could hear them. "i just pray father that you would place your hand heavy upon this production, heavy on nathan..." that kind of stuff particularly, the "place your hand heavy up on this production" shit -- people saying things that are very unnatural, that they heard somewhere else, when someone else was praying too loudly, which just so happens to make them feel like they are world-historic characters during the end times conversing directly with god, get it ouuuuuuuut

ok, though, the roommate arguing with the pseudo-husband about the coincidences of numbers...oh...they're fighting now. ok. he doesn't have a license plate.

*watches episode through fingers*

this is the classic nathan fielder feeling

xp fwiw, having never witnessed this, that scene was super cringe

the dude was wild. Kinda surprised people looked into him and he's for real. Like maybe too weird to make up... but he almost felt like an actor playing a bizarre guy one of the writers met.

For anyone who still had any doubt that my brother is a dangerous psycho, please watch S1E2 of The Rehearsal, and see for yourself ☺️

— lite-skinned dy-no-mite (@Sall_Gud) July 23, 2022

now i really want to know what him and the roommate were shouting about

from what i could tell, they were yelling about who was stepping up, what that meant, and whether or not one or both of them would or should step up in that situation

What do you know there’s an article about him

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkgpng/the-most-fascinating-guest-on-the-rehearsal-who-crashed-a-scion-tc-at-100-mph-did-not-enjoy-his-time-on-the-show

Judging by this interview I’d say the show did portray him somewhat accurately

*the rehearsal season 2*

Nathan Fielder: I wanted to see if Mark Wahlberg was telling the truth so I built a real plane with real terrorists flying at a real building to see if he was on one of the planes on 9/11 if it wouldn’t have gone down like that

— zach reinert (@zachreinert0) August 25, 2022

finally finished this. until the last couple of episodes I guess I regarded it more as an amusing curiosity, maybe finding the artifice and the oppressive silliness a bit too much for me to really get invested. (I think I was the rare person who liked episode 1 more than 2-4?)

but then seemingly out of nowhere these astonishing moments of genuine tenderness and humanity, I was honestly shocked to find myself as moved as I was…I think anyone who’s worked in childcare knows the feeling nathan seemed to have experienced with remy.

Really hope they are done with the kid actors in s2 tbh

I have all confidence that season 2 will be completely different.

Errol Morris gets it. https://t.co/U2SttTV5E0 pic.twitter.com/vJRs3hU560

— Scott Tobias (@scott_tobias) August 27, 2022

I may have said this before but I bet Fielder follows Herzog’s dictum of not seeking literal truth but the “ecstatic truth”.

now this is how you do a meme

(probably NSFW)

https://i.imgur.com/JYuO5po.jpg

Leonardo Dicaprio’s girlfriends when they turn 25 pic.twitter.com/aRxBPDkONw

— Men For Fielder (@MenForFieIder) August 31, 2022

okay, four episodes in i think its pretty clear that this show is "about" mental illness
― i cannot help if you made yourself not funny (forksclovetofu), Saturday, August 6, 2022

I don’t know if I would be where I am today without speech and language therapy. It haunts me, honestly, to think that I probably wouldn’t have the relationships or career path I have now were it not for my early behavioral intervention. But by having this meta-cognitive awareness around my autism, I can appreciate the help I received while recognizing autism as a vital part of my identity and acknowledging my limitations rather than suppressing them.

That moment of Fielder trying to make a good first impression on Kor is something most of us can relate to. But through a lens of disability, it speaks to the loneliness of how masking deprives autistic people of our humanity, of not being afforded the space for awkwardness and messiness in order to make other, more neurotypical, people feel comfortable and secure.

I only just got around to watching the season finale over the holiday weekend. There is something tragicomic in the Fielder character's slow progression from rehearsing the future and anticipating its challenges to rehearsing the past and asking "What could I have done differently?" Somebody upthread mentioned Beckett, and that's very much the vibe I get.

There is something tragicomic in the Fielder character's slow progression from rehearsing the future and anticipating its challenges to rehearsing the past and asking "What could I have done differently?"

This is for real the deepest thing I've read about this show, otm

Agreed and until reading this I didn’t even fully notice/comprehend that that was where we ended up

it's a good point

the more i think about it the more uneasy i am with nathan's use of children. 2 episodes of nathan for you were about kids close to sexual situations. and now the whole season the rehearsal ended up being about kid stuff. like its funny maybe once.

In both those cases (and The Rehearsal, too) he's definitely exploiting kids to manipulate the emotions of adults. It's for sure a pretty cheap trick. Even if the kids were never actually in any sort of danger or whatever, it's really no less sleazy a move than horror movies that put little kids in peril. Effective, but still kind of easy and sleazy. Though I'm not sure how much worse it is than, say, his Holocaust themed clothing store (or, for that matter, peer Sasha Baron Cohen taking advantage of two actual Holocaust survivors for the sake of his dumb comedy). Transgressive comedy that takes advantage of what we intrinsically recognize as tasteless, another (queasy) sleight of hand trick that "The Rehearsal" sort of acknowledges in passing when Angela criticizes Nathan for eating poop. Of course it's not poop, it's just a candy bar, but the effect is largely the same, even if the literal act is essentially victimless.

All assuming any of his projects have any actual reality in it at all?

do think there is cognition involved in anything utterly fake since it is presumably rehearsed if so.

To clarify, I don't know for sure what is and is not to believed as presented, but even more than the reality shows he is parodying I've always got it in the back of my mind that 100% of it is probably scripted, including the narratives about how people in the show are affected by the show, because even those parts are "in the show" and just as much likely to be prewritten.

Like for an actor o be saying something it must be learned to some degree. It's not like it can be channeled from elsewhere or anything and not show that. So there will be some touching on of themes not understood etc so wondering what effect that has.
& if there is enough understanding to actually shut things out before one has a more mature understanding of things and even if one can fully then.
Just did find it very weird the use of child actors for some of the thought here. Not to be overly pro censorship but did have me wondering to what extent things were understood that were touched on

LIke it has to have some understanding for them to deliver, not going to be absolutely abstract. Or they wouldn't be able to coherently.
& is it enough to build to some heavy misunderstandings that they need to work through at a later date.

JUst seems to be something I wouldn't really touch on just to make an amusing tv show. But may be something that has some degree happening every time you have a child actor in a show with adult themes they don't understand. Don't think its completely throwaway.

he keeps doing it. he seems fixated and it's not really that funny.

I thought it was really neat how the final episode turned that whole concept on its head, by using an actor who thought the fake situation was actually real. It did make me wonder a lot about child actors and how often that sort of thing happens. A show like Shameless puts its child actors in much more extreme & graphic situations than this show does & I can't help but wonder if some of them have difficulty differentiating real life and television. afaik this is the only show that really explores that.

also as far as his tendency to use child actors, Nathan's shows thrive on uncomfortable & unpredictable situations, and what's more unpredictable and morally ambiguous than using kids for an adult TV show?

taking real life kids to an evangelical church where they preach about hell all the time

idk i just don't think it's that cool or like taking comedy to the next level. like it's kids man. and the shit he does with them is fucked up.

I would prefer something that did understand consent and I would think consent depended on having an understanding of processes that one was very unlikely to have that young.

i think people are too quick to be like "no this is intelligent tv! there's layers to this! using children is putting a mirror on society!" when it's not actually any of those things. people love nathan and defend him to death. take a step back and look at those eps of nfy and it's actually p fucked up.

Speaking for myself all I was saying was that I don't take anything I saw in the show at face value, including the narrative that a few of the child actors were confused and could not tell real from make-believe. As far as I know those were just plot points in the show as well. Now, whether any of the child actors were confused in the same or other ways OUTSIDE of what we saw, that's another thing. Or maybe both is true and that is sad for those kids and not so funny after all.

This was fascinating television but i dunno if i liked it or can even recommend it exactly? With some distance, it's like a strange dream.

My first reaction after the finale was that the episode was essentially scripted—if not line by line, at least in the “Curb" way. Like, do I believe the real Nathan Fielder, in the course of putting together his show, had some sort of unexpected epiphany about himself or his work on camera? No. I believe he planned the show with a narrative/thematic arc in mind, and as such, he intended from the outset for his character to insert himself into the house, for the show to increasingly focus on “Nathan” and the show’s premise, and that the pointed dialog from fake Angela was scripted. As such, I figured the whole situation with the child actor believing it was real was fictional as well, though that tweet upthread from a family member works against it.

OTOH, my partner took the entire episode at face value as real, unforeseen events—I suppose the answer lies somewhere in between.

I think either the chronology is a little off or he really did leave Angela on her own to go through the motions with ever-aging child actors for a significant amount of time

The irl timeline is one of the many mysteries of the show.

I doubt the months of having a house rented and occupied for months on end was remotely real. But still if they are only filming the small bits that need to be shot to make a narrative it still takes somebody learning parts and rehearsing them and the bits being edited.
Assume that a series of clips supposed to show time lapsing over a given time must be filmed in about that time, though if they're going to go as far as faking weather for the area who really knows. BUt if it is over a longer time then tehy would need to continue to have access to the same place?

When you're out on the town...

Nathan Fielder is at the Mets game and they put him on the Jumbotron 😂 pic.twitter.com/8N66HLRAue

— Lee J 🪩 (@Lee_Jameson) October 8, 2022

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/10/kor-skeetes-un-rehearsed-celebrity-life

https://www.gq.com/story/gq-hype-nathan-fielder-men-of-the-year-2022

men for fielder of the year

Fashion can be so ridiculous. In the second photo in that article, you can maybe just about tell that Nathan is wearing a black belt - a few centimetres of it are showing.

Belt (price upon request), by Ann Demeulemeester.

"Oh man, I love that belt he's wearing! I must request the price to see if I can afford to make that kind of impression!"

https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/kate-berlant-in-conversation-with-nathan-fielder

i have liked some of Kate Berlant's work but Cinnamon in the Wind left me cold.

ok

it's improv so i imagine it varied from performance to performance. being in the audience for that kind of show is more or less necessary, you have to be part of the energy of the room and watch her react to what the crowd is giving out or else it comes off (as I found it on tape) premeditated, hyperaware and joyless... and not in the way she intended.

i thought it was really good, i find her enjoyable to watch even if i'm not cracking up

Enjoyed the show for the most part until the last episode. I thought there was going to be some “stop”, so to speak, with the rehearsal when he realized what had happened with Remy. The fact he kept going and portraying Remy’s mother and “acting” as her left a real sour taste for me.